Serenity

Remember my $SOI thesis anon? Soitec interview commentary today:

- 80% of capacity reservation agreements expected within 1-2 weeks, with more than 10 in total.

- $200M Photonics-SOI revenue now described as "absolutely a floor"

$Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US) also sees SiPH going mainstream in 2027 with market share topping 50%+ of the optical transceiver market

If you hold a monopoly-like position over a chokepoint:

(UBS estimates Soitec has 95% share of the market for substrates underpinning silicon photonics chips)

Revenue usually flows through you.

“Memory is a bubble.” Explain this then, KOSPI bears:

Samsung has reportedly reserved ~70% of its memory production capacity through 2031 via LTAs with $NVIDIA(NVDA.US), $Microsoft(MSFT.US), and $Alphabet(GOOGL.US) as main counterparties.

Five years of demand visibility…

Imagine Celestial ($Marvell Tech(MRVL.US) acquisition) was public.

The valuation would probably be astronomical in US markets (if I had to guess, $6-10B)

Because 2028 revenue projections were $500m (q4 annualized runrate), 2029 revenue projections were $1B.

And because Celestial is a core part of hyperscaler CPO programs.

Celestial's 2026 Q2 earnings would have been:

- Close to $0 revenue (Marvell said "revenue and earnings since the acquisition were not material")

- Losing -$12.5M/quarter ($50M/year)

Would people who knew what they were talking about looking at qualification cycle players say...

1. based on Celestial's Q2 P/S numbers and because it was losing -$12.5M a quarter... That it's a worthless meme stock?

Or

2. with CPO hyperscaler opportunities for 2028, it should be valued at $6-10B?

And I think that's a core cultural disagreement between US / EU cultures + markets.

If you knew how to evaluate qualification cycle players, which number actually matters? I'd argue overwhelmingly the latter.

It’s been a little disappointing to see a pattern with some people I've interacted with on X:

- try to engage with the same audience, then quickly move toward aggressively monetizing it

- get upset when I choose not to participate in or amplify paid groups

- throw out personal or illogical attacks and try to reframe that as simply disagreeing over fundamentals

When I first joined X, a lot of finance content revolved around watches/private jets + options, paywalled communities promising the "secrets of Wall Street," and squiggly-line charts.

One of the things I've wanted to do differently is publish my research and reasoning openly, for everyone.

I think this definitely resonated with folks given my follower growth.

But of course, this growth can also create friction with people whose business models rely on using X to funnel audiences into paid services or expensive paywalls.

My subscription has been $1 for months and will stay at the minimum, despite claims at the beginning I would raise it to $100.

All of my core theses are published on the main timeline for free. I could put substantially more behind a paywall. I just don't want to.

I just prefer sharing the ideas openly and letting everyone decide for themselves.

Many ideas have worked out well: $AXT(AXTI.US), $Nebius(NBIS.US), $Aehr Test(AEHR.US), $Micron Tech(MU.US), $Intel(INTC.US), $EWY, $Marvell Tech(MRVL.US), $Lumentum(LITE.US), $RPI, $IQE, $SOI, $Tower Semicon(TSEM.US), $Arm(ARM.US), $Coherent Corp.(COHR.US), and a lot more.

Others ran into unexpected industry delays, like $LPKF with glass substrates and Auros with hybrid bonding.

Some are still playing out into 2027/2028, including $SIVE, Foci, Shunsin, $Churchill Capital XI(CCXI.US), $XFAB and the broader CPO/humanoid themes.

Some are brand new like Etron/ESMT for DDR2/DDR3.

And many like $Jabil(JBL.US) to Murata to $Maxlinear(MXL.US), I just share for fun to see if the idea is right.

Not every idea will be right. That's part of research.

But I'd much rather have an X where people openly publish the thesis and reasoning so everyone can learn from it.

Than one where information increasingly disappears behind $100 paywalls or becomes diluted with engagement-bait noise.

Hopefully I can help create a new culture on X rather than amplify the old one.

I know everyone’s watching $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) earnings right now…

But did you know Landmark signed a 4 year CW agreement with US customer to ensure “sufficient supply”?

So now you have:

- $Lumentum(LITE.US) (capacity gone)

- $Coherent Corp.(COHR.US) (capacity gone)

- Landmark (capacity committed)

- $Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US) (capacity for transceivers)

- $Macom Tech(MTSI.US) (not online)

- $Semtech(SMTC.US) (limited)

I remember saying earlier this year CW lasers would be the next optical shift and heavily bottlenecked by Nvidia?

So fun watching this play out, with players signing LTAs already to 2030 (signaling less availability for other players).

Implications for $SIVE / Win Semi are very material as one of the few remaining CW merchant suppliers with capacity (+ CPO-grade lasers).

Let’s see how they execute.

All right back to $Semtech(SMTC.US) movie: "The bottleneck go Brrr":

My favorite quote was: "availability currently matters more than pricing".

In the current market for optical products.

- No near-term erosion is expected on booked optical orders, which signals they're passing cost increases through fine.

- I was actually curious most about Semtec's CW laser products after the HieFo takeover:

Semtech expects CW-laser revenue for transceivers to begin H1 FY28. Explicitly said capacity is limited.

They still seem materially further behind compared to the laser leaders, but they're making progress for 2027 ramp.

- TIA and driver solutions remain in exceptionally strong demand (confirmed from $Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US) earnings).

Continues to deepen engagement across all the leading hyperscalers.

"We are now designing to every module provider", expected 50%+ market share for 1.6T FiberEdge (TIA + driver) by years end.

Very strong statement to make about being majority market share.

- 1.6T FiberEdge qualifications finishing earlier than expected (good read through for your pluggable makers eg. AOI)

q: "quick thoughts on how long into 2028 does that backlog extend?"

a: The backlog for the remaining of this fiscal year, I would say for our target is all booked. For the next year, we probably over 70% there.

Management said current capacity may not be enough for fiscal 2028, especially in the second half (great demand visibility)

Q2 revenue:

- $341.9M vs. ~$329M expected

- adjusted EPS was $0.71 vs. $0.61

Q3 guidance was most exciting:

$410M revenue vs. ~$360M revenue

$1.05 EPS vs. $0.73 EPS.

yeah... just look at that beautiful revenue inflection Q/Q.

So gigantic beat, great read through on 1.6T ramp. I don't own Semtec, but these were amazing earnings.

I know everyone's focused on Nancy Pelosi copytraders sending $Bloom Energy(BE.US) up 11.83%. Or Trump...

But you know what else is cool?

FAU bottlenecks for CPO.

I remember saying earlier this year FAU/Foci might be a future bottleneck around $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US) / $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) CPO roadmaps...

This was some media commentary supporting that:

"It is understood that Largan Precision (3008), FOCI (3363), and China’s TFC have entered $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) FAU supply chain"

"Based on an estimated 20,000 Spectrum-X systems shipped this year, the optical engines installed in those systems would require approximately 600k-700k FAUs"

In 2027, demand is expected to reach several million units, and existing supply chain capacity is currently unable to meet demand." (UDN, mandarin -> english translation is kinda off)

Cough cough, "existing supply chain capacity is currently unable to meet demand"

Tad early right now since mass production is expected H2 2027, but cool to read updates around this.

$NVIDIA(NVDA.US), following their $20B deal... Announces Groq3 LPX now in full production.

With $Nebius(NBIS.US) the first to adopt through Nebius token factory.

- 3,400 tok/s in Artificial Analysis benchmarking running Gemma 4 31B, with 100k token context

- 4x faster responsiveness than the nearest alternative

Thing that caught my attention.. was a former press release after Nvidia's $2B investment into Nebius.

That it would support their "early adoption of Nvidia's latest generation" architectures.

Guess we're seeing that special treatment here.

It's been fun to read these US Gov fact sheets (few a week) recently.

Earlier this week was "Golden Age of Space Transportation", with $SpaceX(SPCX.US) hard carrying the launch sector like Faker.

And $Rocket Lab(RKLB.US) + other rocket companies as beneficiaries of the 1K launch/reentry goal by 2030.

This month we also had:

- Drone component tariffs

- American Mining / Critical Mineral deals

- Polysilicon supply chains tariffs

and a lot more... So helpful to see what sectors US policy is focusing on.

We got $Lumentum(LITE.US), $Macom Tech(MTSI.US), $Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US) all pointing to extreme demand imbalances with lasers/TIA/DSP/etc from earnings...

And now Elazr GM at their investor conference stated:

Optical supply is still far behind the market demand, the expected AI optical supply chain are likely to continue for years.

- "the entire supply chain is out of stock"

- "the supply is still far behind the market demand"

- "the shortage will continue to the next few years"

"Whether it is PCB, carrier board, laser chip, or even related packaging capacity, as long as the AI supply chain link, almost all are in short supply."

When demand visibility extends for years with the supply chain bottlenecked:

It's getting difficult not to see photonics echoing the memory supercycle entering 2027.

So just tracking the MLCC cycle:

ComponentNews classified server MLCCs as “severe” shortage stage, with ETNews reporting:

- Samsung has reached ~40 week lead times for some high capacitance MLCCs per DigiKey’s shipment data.

Earlier this year, broader reports were ~20 weeks, so the AI server MLCC bottleneck keeps growing.

- Murata was ~24 weeks in June.

July was ~30 weeks. And now some at ~36 weeks.

This was interesting:

“The expansion of new production capacity is being postponed from Q4 2026 to 2027”

Doesn’t say which expansion… maybe Murata? But if capacity expansion reportedly gets stalled, the bottleneck should tighten short term.

Lead times are a good way to track demand imbalances.

Just some TLDRs of stuff I found interesting:

- $Sandisk(SNDK.US) 80% adjusted gross margins projections through 2030, ~75% operating margins and ~50% adjusted FCF margins from investor day.

LTAs already 2/3rd of 2028 output. Minimum contracted revenue reaches $93B (MC is currently ~$239B)... Hard to be a cyclical stock when your revenue/targets are expected to continue 4Y later into 2030.

- $Coreweave(CRWV.US) signs contracts for 6Y old $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) A100 GPUs through 2029.

For Neoclouds like Nebius/Iren, this is positive, since it's a counterargument for eg. Burry depreciation short thesis

- conventional DRAM gross margins eg. Micron is estimated to reach an unprecedented 95% by 2027, surpassing HBM GMs per UBS

read through for legacy/standard dram players like Nanya/Winbond should go brrrr if projections are correct.

- Anthropic reportedly achieved 14x+ YoY growth and roughly 2.4x sequential revenue growth q2 to >$11.5B,. estimating growth to $190–200B in 2028r evenue numbers.

Your frontier labs keep growing at stupidly fast paces, it would be worrisome if they didnt.

- $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) reportedly in talks to invest $3B in SB Energy (Softbank subsidiary), creates a >$500B compute financing push with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman, and others. $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) Feynman reportedly moves to TSMC A16 + SoIC + custom HBM + CPO in H2 2028

Just more nvidia news every day

- $Microsoft(MSFT.US) Maia 300 discussed $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US) capacity for >300k units in 2027, with expansion to 1m+. Unveils as soon as September.

Likely $Marvell Tech(MRVL.US) should be more happy from this news. For what's happening right now:

- maybe GUC for Microsoft current ASIC ramp.

- For the Amazon party, stuff like Alchip (I do own shares), likely is ramping now with $Amazon(AMZN.US) ASIC program H2 2026...

So might be a good idea to look at hyperscaler ASIC ramp timelines + their beneficiaries.

- $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US) VP of Advanced Packaging stated "the industry is likely to face not only memory shortages but also tight ABF substrate supply over the next few years"...

Emphasis on few years for memory + ABF substrates for bottlenecks.

Even upstream abf substrate equipment providers are happy, eg. Eternal Precision which uses vacuum lamination equipment stated orders surged, their plants have been running at full capacity, and 20%+ price hikes.

- $Applied Materials(AMAT.US) expects advanced packaging revenue to grow >70% in 2026, versus prior >50%, and said customer discussions now extend all the way to 2030

(not too familiar with this company, but found their growth rate from 2025 Q4 $6.8B ->$7.01B -> 7.91B -> $9.12B -> $10.25B Q4 2026 projections pretty interesting)

- Google said at OCP APAC said conventional 48V is running out of headroom. $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) detailed an 800VDC MGX-compatible rack H2 2026 (timeline, Delta / Lite-On beneficaries)

- Aside from $Sandisk(SNDK.US), Nanya LTAs cover 50% of capacity. CXMT signed multi-year DRAM agreements last month, so entire memory industry seems to be following same playbook as ur big 3.

- Probe cards remain a bottleneck, MPI(6223) said their probe card capacity remains fully utilized because demand exceeds supply.

Already covered the CW laser bottleneck with $Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US), $SIVE, and $Lumentum(LITE.US) earlier this week, but that's another fun one.

- some MLCC/component lead times have hit 36 weeks per Nichidenbo.

Your Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Taiyo Yuden, Murata, players should be very happy to hear this.

TLDR: AI supply chains go brrr.

Feels like glass substrate timelines got pushed back at least another quarter.

- "Samsung Electro-Mechanics Delays Semiconductor Glass Substrate Investment" due to a bottleneck in customer reliability evaluations of prototypes.

At its recent second-quarter earnings presentation, less than a month later, the company revised the start of operations to 2028.

- "SKC Reportedly Pushes Glass Substrate Mass Production to 2027, Targets Final Validation by Year-end" (Trendforce), earlier last month.

TLDR:

- SKC Absolics H2 2026 -> H1 2027

- Samsung H2 2027 -> H1 2028

Not everything is always good news with timeline shifts, but glass core substrate shifts do feel imminent.

Volume ramp for some players eg. $LPK / Philoptics (161580) / E&R (8027) likely track these mass production timelines.

In IPO news… Vantage Data Centers is exploring going public at an enormous $100B valuation.

If you’re not familiar, $Oracle(ORCL.US) is their anchor tenant for Stargate (OpenAI end user), and Vantage develops/operates hyperscaler DCs.

Anthropic IPO is also expected, with investors expecting $2T valuation, eclipsing $SpaceX(SPCX.US) per FT.

Yeah… idk about Anthropic valuations. Jim Cramer defending that valuation is never a good sign.

On a side note, Opus 5 is probably the worst consumer LLM I’ve used to date, it’s like a 5 IQ LLM operating off terrible data retrieval. With a Fable-like God complex on top.

Enterprise is probably having a better time though.

Unitree IPO is also expected this month and priced it at a $9B valuation. Which is a positive tailwind for Unitree for the humanoid sectors.

Not really an AI name but SHEIN is going public as soon as the 19th this month.

Go ask any girl you know and they’re probably familiar with this platform.

$SIVE announces a $3.4M development program with SemiNex!

For CPO, DFB laser arrays, and optical amplifiers.

Early production is targeted H2 2027 (in line with early scale up CPO timelines)

Seemed weird to me at first given product overlap, since SemiNex is a much smaller Series B company...

But then I got reminded of a less explicit version of $SpaceX(SPCX.US) + Cursor relationship (derisking by working together first).

There's probably something interesting Sivers found in this company.

$Super Micro Computer(SMCI.US) 2027 guidance was actually unholy: $65-$72 billion FY 2027 revenue guidance...

vs. ~$52.4B expected, a casual +$16.1B above consensus.

SMCI logged a massive $60B+ in news order from this earnings.

That timeline is also interesting when they announced a plan to co-build $SpaceX(SPCX.US) + xAI DCs "within a year" back in June..

But if SMCI sustain 10-15% gross margins off that ~$70B revenue guidance... I think there's a lot of room for rerating given MC is ~$20B (NFA, I have short term positions in SMCI now from this ER).

Most important thing is learning about 2027 margins from call today.

Just putting it out there for people that think AAOI is a one year cycle...

$Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US) projects their ELSFP capacity for CPO to be 400K/units a month in 2028.

400k * ~$400 ELS ASP (GS assumptions) = + another ~$1.92B 2028 annualized revenue capacity added as a new distinct (>50% gross margin) product line.

On top of their existing 2027 projections (eg. ~$5.6B annualized transceiver revenue off $471m/month entering H2).

TAM for 1.6T also goes brrr so I'd expect their end of H2 2027 projections to go up as more capacity comes online...

For certain optical names, it's one cycle (eg. 1.6T, CPO scale out/up, NPO etc. ), stacked on top of one another... stacked on top of another... with TAM + margins stacking like minions after Anivia uses W in line.

Rather than one-and-done off of one year.

This is a stark contrast to some other sectors where growth is likely to decelerate after maybe 1 year of triple digit Y/Y revenue growth.

uhhh... the Unitree IPO is more than 8000 times oversubscribed by retail investors.

The demand for pure play humanoid companies is absolutely enormous?

I'm personally in the US-based Agility Robotics club (Softbank, $NVIDIA(NVDA.US), $Amazon(AMZN.US), Foxconn, etc), at $2.5B premoney via $Churchill Capital XI(CCXI.US).

And my take is that Unitree likely opening at $30B+ (from pre-ipo perps), might bring the leading US players some more attention in a week or two.

Regardless that's just absurd demand.

Woah, $Riot Platforms(RIOT.US) announced a $9.1B deal with Anthropic, with a possible contract extending to $16.1B, over 20Y.

$AMD(AMD.US) also exercised its option to expand its existing deal with Riot. (And they still have another 1 GW campus they have LOI with for a tenant)

In terms of timelines, seem like most of the Colo basket have their revenue inflections hit H2 2027?

(Eg. Riot Anthropic deal targets Dec 2027 for first 96 MW, AMD full 50 MW - May 2027)

It’s cute to see all the former miners like $IREN(IREN.US) and co. grow up.

Be Barrons:

- Wants to write about optical supply supply chains like $Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US)

- Hiring DPT: who needs engineers to write about this something this simple? Let’s find underpaid political philosophy backgrounds.

- proceeds to find a new hire from nonprofit communication consulting

- first day on job: gets paid to model revenue ramp/margins projections, CW laser bottlenecks, internal capacity

- New hire: “I don’t understand this sht”, “looks like a memestock”

Barrons: “Memestock? looks like our next article, I don’t understand either”.

Now that markets are hosting a laser party again from $SIVE, OE Solutions, $Lumentum(LITE.US), Coherent, to $Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US).

There’s a pretty interesting study:

Both from Fidelity and a UC Berkeley research paper, that the best investors are the ones who either…

- Anecdotally forgot about their account (Fidelity)

- Didn’t actively trade/overtrade (18.5% return from infrequent traders vs. 11.4%).

Not any advice, but some of these anecdotes might be helpful to retail to read in general…

Since I witnessed a lot capitulation off memory, photonics, or thematic volatility, just for retail not have positions on a sharp recovery.

Having conviction also usually people in that “not overtrading” camp, since it helps to not overtrade in drops or see opportunities to cost average.

Just some near term events:

- OCP APAC tomorrow (Ayar, Lightmatter, $AMD(AMD.US), $NVIDIA(NVDA.US)) and your CPO players are giving announcements/updates.

This should be a catalyst for certain optical players.

- Earnings week: with $AST SpaceMobile(ASTS.US), $Rocket Lab(RKLB.US) reporting today (space), $Lumentum(LITE.US) on Tuesday (photonics), $Nebius(NBIS.US) in the middle of the week (Neocloud), and more.

- Unitree IPO subscriptions opened up today and Listing is expected this month.

Should be a potential catalyst for the humanoid + robotics sector if it opens up well eg. $Churchill Capital XI(CCXI.US).

Fun week ahead.

Today I'm writing a weekend guide on how to do DD when shorting $Nebius(NBIS.US):

First, you look at hyperscaler earnings for AI cloud read through:

> $Alphabet(GOOGL.US): reports record AI cloud demand + backlog + margin increases from earnings

> $Amazon(AMZN.US): reports record AI Cloud demand + backlog + margin increases from earnings

> $Meta Platforms(META.US): reports higher than expected prices for available capacity from earnings.

Now, time to look at Nebius:

-> $Nebius(NBIS.US): Growing hundreds of percent to $7-9B ARR by Q4. Growing margins, and guided 4GW+ contracted power.

-> Sees Uber/Waymo splitting, putting more focus on Avride

-> Sees Clickhouse growing rapidly every quarter.

Okay looks bad! But next, you need a hedge?

-> Wow! A $NIKE brand executive, after the stock dropped 75% over the past 5 years, went to $Lululemon(LULU.US) to save that brand next? Lululemon seems good.

Conclusion: Short Nebius and go long on $Lululemon(LULU.US)

I've mapped the entire Wall Street bear playbook on AI names:

Have your favorite institution/media insert one of these name down below:

1. < ______ [GPUs, Transcivers, MLCC, Memory...] are a commodity set to crash>

2. < ______ [YMTC, CXMT, Dongshan...] from China will flood the market >

3. < ______ [Micron, Nvidia, ...] from unverifiable channel checks is facing issues >

4. < ______ [Kospi, Sivers, ...] is a bubble like the ____ [2007, 2021] crash>

5. <____ [1,2,3, ...] unexpected rate hikes this year>

6. < _____ [Google, Nvidia, Deepseek ...] optimization removes the need of this!>

in a new headline, and it's ready to go!

There we go, White House finally invests in more breath in critical minerals/materials. Amazing policy move, as a TLDR:

- $Westwater Resources(WWR.US) receives $25M (graphite)

- $Scully Royalty(SRL.US) (ASX) receives $400M (Scandium)

- $5E Advanced Materials(FEAM.US) receives $8M (Boron)

- $HREE receives $4.8M (magnet rare earths)

out of the public companies.

With more private investments from $150 million into Niron Magnetics or $85 million into Standard Bauxite.

It's literally spare change to the US gov, for ENORMOUS amount of downstream applications.

More should be done with funding amounts to accelerate development and derisk supply chains (don't own any of the above, just support the policy move), but great announcement.